Oracle offers a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of cloud applications, platform services, and engineered systems. With more than 400,000 customers—including 100 of the Fortune 100—in more than 145 countries, Oracle provides a complete technology stack both in the cloud and in the data center. Oracle’s industry-leading cloud-based and on-premises solutions give customers complete deployment flexibility and unmatched benefits including application integration, advanced security, high availability, scalability, energy efficiency, powerful performance, and low total cost of ownership. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), visit oracle.com.

Forbes BrandVoice™ allows marketers to
connect directly with the Forbes audience by enabling them to create
content – and participate in the conversation – on the Forbes digital publishing
platform. Each BrandVoice™ is produced
by the marketer.
More on BrandVoice™ here
, or email us directly at
brandvoice@forbes.com.

Career Suicide and the CIO: 4 Deadly New Threats

A Twitter comment yesterday quoted a CIO as saying, “It’s hard to be strategic with your pants on fire.”

No doubt about it–unless that CIO’s wearing asbestos long-johns, that’s definitely a tough maneuver to execute.

But if we’re trying to conjure up truly difficult scenarios, I’ll see that pants-on-fire bet and double it: what’s really hard for CIOs is to be strategic when they’re unemployed. Out of a job because they couldn’t juggle the brutal but essential loads imposed by the strategic urgency of today’s always-on global economy.

In that clever pants-on-fire line, substitute CEO for CIO: how much confidence will a CEO earn if he or she attempts to hedge responsibilities with the conditional qualifier that “It’s hard to be strategic with your pants on fire”?

As my dear mother used to tell her knucklehead sons, “If it was easy, anybody could do it.” And in that context, I think that bet-hedging attitude among CIOs has got to go the way of the TRS-80: it was novel and convenient in its time, but today it’s hopelessly out of date, overmatched, and irrelevant.

In fact, I’d submit that that sort of attitude is one of the primary reasons CIOs in some organizations—perhaps many/most organizations—are seen as last among C-level equals. And with an outlook like that–strategic thinking and action requires calm and static environments–they deserve such a ranking.

It’s not quite a trigger for career suicide, but it sure as heck puts limits on that executive’s potential to advance, to gain credibility with the CEO and the board, and to be seen by peers as indispensable to the organization’s growth, innovation, and success.

Speaking of career suicide for CIOs, today’s business challenges and the rapidly evolving pace of technology change are combining to generate a new set of career-ending threats for the chief information officer, and I’d like to suggest four in particular.

Of course, this list isn’t meant to be all-encompassing, and doesn’t include catastrophic failures such as transaction systems going down for extended periods, lousy security, or out-of-control spending and such. Rather, these new threats arise from the parallel new opportunities that await business-driven CEOs who are willing and eager to transcend the old confines of the CIO position and move up to being strategic leaders primarily focused on growth and innovation and customers.

Threat #1: Lack of Vision. No matter how technically astute, no matter how many wildly complex projects have been completed, no matter how dependable, CIOs today will not succeed and will need to be replaced if they don’t have an ability to see not only where their company and industry are and have been, but where they are headed, why they’re headed that way, and what all-new minefields and opportunities are looming. Business models and processes are mutating faster than ever before, customer tastes and requirements are moving even faster than that, and new technologies—social, mobile, customer experience, cloud suites, private clouds, in-memory computing, and more—will continue to pour into the market. CIOs have to have the vision to be able to stay on top of and harness the power of those changes rather than be intimidated and overwhelmed by them.

Threat #2: Lack of Leadership. For too long, many CIOs have been willing to sit at the kids’ table, waiting for the grown-ups at the big table to decide what would be done and how it would be done and why. CIOs today need to be active and inspiring participants in those conversations and relentless contributors to new ways for their companies to get closer to customers, find new sources of revenue, create new products more quickly, accelerate all facets of their operations, and embed value-creating technologies in not just the IT infrastructure but in the company’s products, services, processes, and culture.

Threat #3: Trying to Resist the Social/Mobile Revolution. Whatever the objection to them and however valid those objections might be in theory, social and mobile technologies and processes are triggering sweeping improvements in how companies communicate with customers and employees, monitor discussions around their brands, engage customers and prospects more immediately and precisely, and gain real-time insights into powerful market trends and possibilities. Just a few years ago, this level of change and opportunity would have been almost unfathomable, and any CIO who tries to hold back the surge because of well-intentioned but tactical concerns over security or governance or standards is going to get overruled, then marginalized, and then reassigned.

Threat #4: Surrendering to the 80/20 budget trap. In a recent column called The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2013, I ranked this as the #1 priority for CIOs in the coming year. The rationale is simple—not easy, but simple: unless CIOs lead the way in reducing the portion of their overall IT budgets now spent on low-value infrastructure and keeping the lights on (it’s typically between 70% and 80%), then they will never liberate the funds necessary to invest in and create customer-facing applications and other innovative approaches to growth and engagement. In the past, suitable alternatives to server sprawl and grossly underutilized storage weren’t available; today they are. And those alternatives represent the key for CIOs to modernize their infrastructure to match the performance needs of tomorrow while also bending the spending curve away from low-value clutter to high-value innovation. The CIO’s mantra should be this: more innovation, less integration.

Is it easy? Certainly not.

Will you sometimes have to be strategic while your pants—heck, your entire outfit—are on fire? Absolutely.

But that’s the price of being a world-changing business-technology here in the transformative days of late 2012. Onward!

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

Nobody said that being a CIO is easy but in current times, you not only have to deliver but deliver at a low cost whilst constantly justifying the spend. Never easy but its either that or get used to having hot legs from your pants being on fire…!

If I may be so bold as to give you a brief excerpt from a piece on my blog which may also add some context here (http://www.christianmcmahon.com/?p=21) :

Innovation is the real key here and in these tough times, its what is going to bring and keep IT at the top table whilst gaining you the full support of your peers. Innovation is what separates the old-fashioned ‘lights on’ mentality of the old school IT Director from the new school machinations of the CIO. Indeed, many suggest that the title of CIO should stand for Chief Innovation Officer rather than the traditional Chief Information Officer (more of that on another day). One thing is for sure, you don’t want to be stagnating as the old school IT Director any longer and in any type of organisation this can no longer be tolerated. When the now more frequent organisational reviews take place, you certainly don’t want to be the person searching frantically for a chair to sit on when the music stops….

Christian, thanks for the excellent perspectives and for sharing the link to your blog. Your central point–that there are worlds of difference between the IT Director of yesterday and the CIO of today and tomorrow–can’t be overemphasized.

Great post and all key components CIOs must understand if they ever want to truly embrace/occupy their seat at the c-suite table. It really comes down to being able to leverage your business accumen in order to properly apply technology. Businesses need strategic leaders with solid business smarts to guide them through this increasingly global environment, and CIOs need to be able to recognize the opportunities and move swiftly.

Bob, This is an excellent and very thoughtful article. Your four “suicide risks” are right on target.I have taken the liberty of quoting, and referencing, you in my own blog (http://www.enterprisecioforum.com/en/blogs/jdobbs/are-you-committing-career-suicide) which I hope is OK.

Thank you Bob; this is a lot to take in at once. I wonder if companies could start with their customer growth and retention strategy (supported by the CIO). Once these expectations are clear they could translate this into technical capability requirements (per function so that the business flow is smooth and customer friendly). As more than ever customers will decide who is successful going forward. From a budgetary point of view I think that we need to keep space for ongoing investment in new and mobile technologies as well as innovation. In fairness, I think Oracle’s ability to separate or exchange layers of the technology stack could provide a flexibility that the future market might needs (because total solutions that do not have this flexibility could turn out to limit businesses to adapt when required). What do you think?

CIO much? With all due respect, I don’t think this means much unless you’ve walked in their shoes for a year or two. You can’t compare what a CIO is asked to do vs. a CEO, given the massive amount of control, influence, and virtually unlimited budget (from a priority perspective) and resources. Everybody drops what they’re doing when a CEO says “this is a priority, let’s get it done.” VPs and C-levels shrug their shoulders when a CIO says the same. Quite honestly, I remember CIOs being “at the table” a lot earlier than CCOs, so demeaning their importance does nothing but undermine the CIO and build up walls (which of course may be the purpose). I wonder what your CIO really feels of this post, assuming he read it? Heller’s book is awesome, you should read it. Ditto her CIO Paradox list. She is referencing the balance between time to emphasize strategic projects and planning, vs. the massive amount of time spent in the weeds on operational tasks–that’s a resource thing, and most companies grossly underfund this area at all levels of the technology spectrum, from top to bottom, because they’re expensive as hell. So live in that world for awhile, then let us know if you feel the same :) Until then, we’re comparing apples to oranges. All the other C-levels can sit around and nod their heads in agreement with you, and all the CIOs and their like will sit around and not their heads in agreement with Heller. You’re right, it isn’t easy. It’s virtually impossible, in companies that don’t have virtually unlimited resources (and commitment to effective resourcing at the top) like Oracle, Microsoft, etc. But if you think you can do it, please feel free. All you gotta do is walk the talk for us :)